The virtues of a many-sided life

A couple of weeks ago, covered in lake slime and
pieces of European
water chestnut weed, I climbed into the bathtub and turned on my favorite
podcast from the BBC called Coast and
Country. The subject of the podcast was Dartington Hall in Devon, a
seedbed for radical ideas and creativity since it was founded in 1925.

The core of Dartington’s philosophy is a “many-sided
life:” the idea that we should draw on all of our faculties in our efforts to
transform the world, and by doing so, become transformed ourselves—“head, hands
and heart.” A life with many sides instead of one is bound to be more
productive and fulfilling, both for individuals and for the societies they
create.

Without knowing exactly what I was doing or why it might
be important, I’ve been following the same philosophy since leaving my last full-time
desk job in 2008. Helping to clear the rampantly-invasive chestnut weed from
our local lake is the latest installment of my efforts to build in more manual
labor to my life.

I call it ‘manual labor,’ though of course it’s more
a hobby than a livelihood—there’s little dignity in a sweatshop, and I don’t
pretend to be ‘a worker’ as in ‘working class.’ I’m comfortably off, with
enough security to choose how to spend my time. So increasingly, I’m choosing
to use my hands and not just my head by getting stuck into the hard, physical, collective
work of the community.

As often happens, the more I thought about Dartington
and its ideas, the more I started to come across examples of the same
philosophy in action. An article
in the Guardian reported that ex-President Jimmy Carter was treated for
dehydration after he collapsed while building a house with Habitat for Humanity
in Canada. A piece
in the New York Times explored the life of political scientist James C
Scott, who divides his time between studying peasant resistance and working on a
farm in Connecticut.

Then there was a visit to John Ruskin’s home at Brantwood
in the English Lake District, where reputedly he was just as happy when building
guesthouses, garden walls and harbors with his friends and neighbors as he was when
spinning out radical new ideas on politics and economics. Those ideas included a
minimum wage, social security, free universal education and public ownership of
land, and they set the stage for future developments like the welfare state and the National Trust.

I also commissioned a series
of articles for Transformation on ‘intentional communities’—places like Findhorn
in Scotland, Tamera
in Portugal and Schumacher
College in Devon (another outgrowth of Dartington Hall), which aim to ‘be
the change they want to see’ in the world. Incorporating manual labor into
learning is a central tenet of the experience they offer, whether that’s
through shared domestic tasks like cooking and washing-up, or digging in the
garden, or learning how to paint or make pots and other crafts.

At Dartington’s School for “multi-dimensional”
education, “Students were as likely to learn how to
fix a car engine as to read Chekhov” as Andrea
Kuhn puts it. That probably came in useful for graduates like Michael
Young, who spent the rest of his life inventing new institutions like the
Open University. The virtues of a many-sided life are a common theme in
radical experiments like these, and I’m definitely happier and more fulfilled
as a result of diversifying myself, but why? I can think of at least three
reasons.

First of all, while it does little to dissolve material class boundaries, shared physical
labor begins to erode some of the artificial barriers that have been erected
over time between ‘more’ and ‘less valuable’ forms of work. Manual labor
becomes something that belongs to everyone, rather than being relegated to a
secondary status for a separate group of people who are permanently
under-rewarded.

There’s more than a
touch of voyeurism in what I’m doing since it is always voluntary rather than
enforced. But getting stuck into collective work is surely a better way of
dealing with this problem than simply observing or studying the lives of
others. As the late Ben
Pimlott once wrote about George Orwell,
“the author uses his account of
proletarian life as a peg on which to hang what really interested him: not just
the lives of working-class people as such, but his own inner dialogue about how
middle-class people like himself did and should relate to them.” Shared work takes
this dialogue one step further.

Second, and without
wanting to sound like your Grandad, manual labor is good for you—and it’s also good
for your role in the struggle for social change. In an age when so much social interaction,
communication and activism are virtual, getting stuck into physical work, especially
in a group, provides a much more direct experience of engagement with other
people and a different set of challenges to navigate.

The pace of work is
usually much slower than what’s possible on social media and the internet, and
the level of commitment required is correspondingly higher (we reckon it will
take at least ten years of continuous activity to get rid of the chestnut weed
in the lake). In contrast to the current fashion for ‘frictionless’
solutions, face-to-face negotiations, trade-offs and conflicts are
inevitable because of the sheer scale of the problem or its lack of
malleability, or the vagaries of the weather and the environment, or delays
caused by ill-health or a thousand other things. Translated into social action,
these experiences can build stability and sticking power into movements.

Third and most important,
a fully-integrated life is the best grounding for democratic politics, new
forms of economics, and social problem-solving. We need activists who are also
scholars, nurses and teachers who are also politicians, carpenters who sit on
town councils, entrepreneurs who are also artists, and politicians who are anything
except professional politicians. Mixing things up in this way is far more likely
to generate collective energy, creativity, ideas and perhaps even
consensus than keeping people trapped in boxes that are permanently marked as one
thing or the other.

Of course, here’s no
necessary link between manual labor and the adoption of progressive politics; both
Ronald
Reagan and George
W. Bush delighted in hosting brush-clearing parties down on the ranch during
their respective US presidencies. But at least in an integrated life, each set
of faculties—head, hands and heart—can help to counterbalance the others, guarding
against too
much reason, emotion or brute force in judgment and decision making.

As Terry
Eagleton once pointed out, atrocities like The Holocaust are rooted in the
pursuit of reason unmediated by ethics or emotion, but one can also argue that
a surfeit of ‘heart over head’ or ‘hands over both’ can be just as damaging. Not
only is a many-sided life more personally fulfilling, it also has social and
political effects when scaled-up.

But is such a life a
luxury reserved for those who can afford it? That’s certainly the case today,
when so many people have been boxed into narrow categories and assigned a role
and value according to the dictates of contemporary capitalism—so that
speculators and managers are hugely over-rewarded, while nurses, care workers, labourers and others are penalized through salary structures,
taxation and the unequal allocation of financial risks. The erosion of
institutions that used to challenge some of these categories and reward systems
(like workers’
education and cross-class
civil society groups) has been immensely damaging.

Therefore, re-valuing
manual labor and/or instituting some form of basic income is vital if everyone
is to have the opportunity to do different things with their time—“there is no
wealth but life” as Ruskin
famously put it. After all, a rounded human being has got to be better than
a square one that’s designed to fit neatly into all those boxes of bureaucracy, hierarchy and convention that force people to live a life that is both
limited and divided.

Satish Kumar, one of the
founders of Schumacher College, calls
this a “path to wisdom” instead of just cleverness or shallow success, a preparation
for the essential work of transformation that lies ahead for all of us. So get
out your gloves and your boots and your tools and your brushes and get stuck
in. You won’t regret it.

About the author

Michael Edwards is a
writer and activist based in upstate New York, and the editor of Transformation. His website is www.futurepositive.org and his twitter account is @edwarmi.

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